REINCARNATION l39

social animals and even among the fiercest, the beasts of
prey, the mother sacrifices herself for her helpless offspring,
conquering the law of self-preservation. The mother-bird
or the mother-animal, will sacrifice her own life in-order to
draw away her enemy, man, from the cave or the hiding
place where her young ones are hidden, mother-love
triumphing even over the love of life. But she dies in
the sacrifice. Those who show it most perish—sacrifices
to maternal affection. And among men, the social and
moral qualities are evolved, not by the struggle for
existence where the keenest brain and the most unscru-
pulous conscience carry the day. The humane qualities
of tenderness and compassion can be evolved only by self-
sacrifice ; but there, as in the animal kingdom, the man
who sacrifices himself dies ; and if the social virtues or the
humane virtues tend to kill out their possessors, and to
leave the more selfish and more brutal alive, how can we
explain in man the growth of the spirit of self-sacrifice, the
continuing growth of the most divine qualities which in-
capacitate the man for the struggle of existence ?

Those who have studied Darwinian writings know
that this question is not fully faced there, and is rather
evaded than answered. Reincarnation gives the answer,
that in the continuing life, whether of the animal or of the
man the self-sacrifice stirs up on the side of character a new
power, a new life, a compelling strength, which comes back
over and over again to the world in ever higher and higher
manifestations; that though the form of the mother
perishes, the mother-soul survives, and comes back time
after time; and that those who are such mother-souls are
trained onward, first in the brute kingdom and then in the
human kingdom, so that that which is gained by the soul
at the sacrifice of the body comes back in the reincarnating